


"The Dangling Conversation"

by aces



Category: Doctor Who (EDAs)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-01-22
Updated: 2010-01-22
Packaged: 2017-10-06 13:51:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,647
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/54360
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aces/pseuds/aces
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>I was mildly obsessed with Simon and Garfunkel when I started working on this, namely the "Live from NYC 1967" album. Therefore, "Hazy Shade of Winter" and the name of this story (which is also the name of another song--I'm so clever) belong to Paul Simon. The characters belong to the BBC.</p>
    </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I was mildly obsessed with Simon and Garfunkel when I started working on this, namely the "Live from NYC 1967" album. Therefore, "Hazy Shade of Winter" and the name of this story (which is also the name of another song--I'm so clever) belong to Paul Simon. The characters belong to the BBC.

He had a song stuck in his head.

Tapping at the TARDIS controls, it took him a moment to realize he was humming; and after he realized, he was stumped to pick out the words, let alone the title of the composition or who had written it. And when. It was an unhappy little melody—-angry.

He wandered out of the console room to sit in the library, wanting to track down when exactly the Emperor of Cicklow went insane, for reasons even he couldn't entirely fathom, and getting distracted along the way by a beat-up copy of one of Christie's Poirot mysteries. And still that tune looped, meandered, wandered its way through his mind, interspersed through his little grey cells.

He shoved the paperback onto the shelf in what was approximately the place he'd found it, stalking out of the library in irritation. The least his brain he could do, he decided, is remember what the lyrics and name of the song were if it was going to get stuck in his head.

He wandered the corridors of his TARDIS disconsolately. He'd seen Anji striding purposefully toward somewhere and hadn't wanted to interrupt whatever she was doing.

Another song began to tug at the edge of his consciousness, pricking up his ears and setting his hearts beating more quickly. Abruptly he realized this wasn't another song in his head; it was something _outside_ his thoughts. A guitar, being strummed. The chords were insistent, plaintive, defiant. They were _calling_ him.

The Doctor brightened. "Just the chap," he murmured to himself and set off in the direction of the distant music.

Fitz was sitting in his ballroom—-strange, that the Doctor thought of this as Fitz's room, when the old girl belonged to no one but herself really. But then, the young man was the only one who spent any time here, the one who sought refuge here. He was hunched in his favourite corner, fingers running lightly and angrily over the strings.

"Time, Time, Time," he sang in a strangely roughened voice, "see what's become of me…while I looked around for my possibilities."

The Doctor's eyes widened.

"Hang onto your hopes, my friend / that's an easy thing to say / but if your hopes should pass away / then simply pretend / that you can build them again," Fitz continued. The quality of his voice changed suddenly, and his fingers moved so sharply the Doctor was surprised he didn't rip the string. "Ohhh, seasons change with the scenery / weaving Time with a tapestry / won't you stop and remember me / at any convenient time…"

He ended the song abruptly, hardly bothering to go through the repetition of the final lyric. The Doctor was applauding immediately, even as he strode across the room to join his friend. Fitz jumped, staring up at him wide-eyed.

"How did you know?" the Doctor asked enthusiastically, plopping to the ground in front of Fitz.

"Sorry?"

"That melody! It's been running through my head for the past two hours at least. It was beginning to drive me mad." The Doctor smiled widely at his friend. "Thank you for finally placing it for me."

Fitz still looked wary. "You're welcome," he said hesitantly and began to lay his guitar aside. The Doctor reached out, placing a hand on Fitz's arm.

"Don't stop," he pleaded, meeting Fitz's grey eyes.

Fitz blinked at him, then blinked down at the hand on his arm. The Doctor didn't let go. Fitz nodded once and resettled his guitar across his lap. The Doctor smiled triumphantly, sitting back.

But the young man had barely strummed through two chords before he stopped to stare up his companion. "I should be dead," he stated. "Shouldn't I?"

"No," the Doctor barely gave himself a chance to pause. "Obviously not, if you're here."

Fitz snorted. "I was existing in an 'indeterminate' whatsit for over a century. The way it sounds to me, if Anji and you hadn't insisted on believing I was still alive I wouldn't even _be_ here." He started playing the guitar again, a fidget, and those insistent notes were _calling_ the Doctor once more.

The Doctor laid a gentling hand on Fitz's arm once more, and the chords stilled, but the young man refused to meet his friend's eye. "In a sense you're right," the Doctor told him softly. "You exist because we weren't ready to let you go." A little smile flashed across the Doctor's face. "You should be thanking us."

Fitz's head shot up at that, grey eyes meeting blue. "I do," he said in a strangely earnest tone. The Doctor was surprised and pulled back slightly to get a better perspective on his friend. Fitz subsided, embarrassed.

But the Doctor would have none of that and leaned forward, a hand under Fitz's chin before he was entirely aware himself what he was doing. Fitz's arms wrapped around the guitar, tightening slowly, but he didn't look away from the Doctor, though he did look as if he seriously wanted to back away from the other man, forgetting he had a wall against his back.

"I'm glad," the Doctor said, and he wasn't sure why the words were so important, "that in this finalized reality, you didn't die. You've been a very good friend, Fitz."

Fitz's grey eyes were wide and vulnerable. "Well, you know," he said, and he sounded like he was trying to ignore the shakiness of his own voice. "You too and all that. Bar all the times you've gotten me—us—in trouble." He seemed to want to look away from the other man but couldn't.

The Doctor frowned, puzzled. "Is something wrong, Fitz?"

"Well, you are holding my chin…"

"Oh." The Doctor let go and wondered if he felt embarrassed. He wasn't sure. Sometimes it was hard to tell his emotional state. He wondered why that was. Humans never seemed to have that problem. Or at least not as often as he did.

"How do you feel, Fitz?" he asked curiously.

"What?" Fitz blinked and clutched even tighter at his guitar as if it could protect him from the Doctor. As if he needed protection from the Doctor. Now the older man knew he felt hurt.

"How do you feel? Emotionally?" Fitz was staring at him. "I was just wondering…" the Doctor was beginning to feel sheepish.

"Erm," said Fitz. "Why, exactly?"

"Well," said the Doctor. "I'm not always sure I know how I'm feeling. I was merely wondering if…if you ever had that-trouble."

Fitz nodded slowly, a distant glassy look in his eyes. It wasn't often Fitz Kreiner got introspective. "Yeah," he said vaguely. "All the time."

"Really?" The Doctor tried not to feel relieved. "You always seem to know exactly what you're feeling. Happy. Sad. Scared. Angry. Sarcastic. Hungry. In need of a cigarette. You make it all seem so wonderfully simple."

Fitz snorted, then started laughing. The Doctor stared at him. "Sorry?"

"_Simple_," the human gasped. "That's brilliant. Simple!" He stopped laughing gradually and looked at the Doctor.

"You're lucky," he said, studying the Doctor's face. "You really are, sometimes. Not to know what you're feeling. And not to be too worried by it."

The Doctor frowned. "I've always rather envied you your ability just to feel," he confessed wistfully. "All you humans."

Fitz looked sad. "It's not always all it's cracked up to be," he said, and something in his tone had been sending confused little warning bells off in the Doctor's mind for a while now.

"Are you unhappy, Fitz?"

"What makes you say that?" Fitz sounded ironic.

The Doctor gestured at him, rather helplessly. "You don't seem happy," he said finally.

Fitz started strumming his guitar again, thoughtfully. The Doctor watched him, waiting, but for what he wasn't entirely sure.

"Would you like to feel something?" Fitz asked quietly, not looking up from the instrument he held, manipulated with a grace he saved for few other things, in his hands.

"Yes," the Doctor said quickly, even as he frowned in puzzlement, curiosity, not entirely sure what to expect. But that had never stopped him from throwing caution to the winds before.

Fitz nodded slowly to himself. "It's really not as simple as you think, Doctor," he said quietly, and still he refused to look up at his friend. "You'd be surprised." He carefully laid the guitar aside, propping it against the wall next to him. And then he finally looked up, directly into the Doctor's eyes. And his eyes were still grey and wide and vulnerable.

The Doctor met his gaze willingly, openly, waiting.

Fitz leaned forward and kissed him.

It was a fairly long, thorough kiss, and then Fitz broke away and stood up, picking up his guitar. "It's really very complicated," he said, grey eyes shadowed, and he trudged slowly out of the room.

The Doctor remained sitting on the floor, staring at the wall in front of him, not entirely sure of what he was feeling.


	2. "The Dangling Conversation" (revisited)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Basically the same story as the last, only with a few changes (major one is the change in pov) and more Simon &amp; Garfunkel.

The problem, Fitz thought to himself miserably as he huddled in a corner of the bar, the first bar he'd found upon landing on the space station, the nearest bar that had no real lighting worth speaking of, and in which everyone very decidedly minded their own business, and where he could get good and quietly drunk as quickly as possible, was that he didn't know when to keep his mouth shut.

He signaled to the barman for another drink and started on it as soon as it was within grabbing reach. It was his third drink of the day—night, if you wanted to go by the lack of lighting in the bar, night if you wanted to go by the feel of the space station itself, day if you wanted to go by Fitz's own time sense, which was admittedly wonky on the best days and this most certainly wasn't one of his best days. One of his most spectacularly _bad_ days wouldn't be too far out of reach, actually, and that might not even be enough to really get across the descriptive total _badness_ of his day so far. Not even being entirely certain if you were alive or dead couldn't really compare to the awful creepy feeling slithering around his stomach and head right now. He took another gulp of his drink in the hopes that it'd make the feeling go away. It only made it worse, spreading into his chest from both directions. Natch.

He'd woken up depressed at some point in what he liked to consider today. Which wasn't that odd, he quite often woke up depressed, and he told himself it was because of the depressing things he'd seen, and because he hadn't actually gotten laid in Christ knew how long, and because he was getting uncomfortably old, and really, sometimes it's just good to wallow in a good depression. Only enough was enough, and this was beyond wallowing, mate, when you keep waking up every day depressed. So he'd slunk off to his favourite place in the TARDIS with his guitar and decided to get all the wallowing out of his system in one go by playing. It'd worked before, right? Yeah.

So there he was in the ballroom, trying to cheer it up, trying to cheer himself up, and failing in that special pathetic way he had. He'd been going for happy songs, he'd been going for angry songs, he'd been going for plaintive songs, he'd been going for some good old-fashioned rock 'n' roll in the hopes that those simple songs with their simple chords and lyrics and rhythms and bloody fantastic sheer joy at being alive and groovy and dancing would make him feel better. Only nothing doing.

He gave up in despair, letting his fingers play whatever the hell they wanted, and sat back to let his mind take a rest. Only it didn't want to rest, it wanted to think about how depressed it was, and it wanted to try to reason out why it was so depressed because the obvious reasons obviously weren't the right reasons, were they? And why shouldn't they be, dammit? They were good reasons. Fantastically, brilliantly good reasons to be depressed. Just not the right ones.

His fingers seized on the guitar strings, twanging disagreeably, and he scowled in self-disgust and then began picking out a new song, something with a driven, insistent opening, because it suited his mood perfectly, and yeah, _finally_ something was going right, _this_ was right, this was powerful and honest and just _right_.

"Time, Time, Time / see what's become of me," he spat the lyric out, "while I looked around for my possibilities…"

He'd forgotten that playing in this room was audible throughout the whole TARDIS, and he'd forgotten that even if he couldn't see them, he still had an audience minimum of two. But by this point, he didn't really care.

"Seasons change with the scenery / weaving Time in a tapestry / won't you stop and remember me, at any convenient time…"

He stormed through the rest of the song and stopped abruptly, fingers still humming, breath panting in the sudden ringing silence. He felt good. Better, anyway. Like he'd gotten something out of his system.

Somebody was clapping. Fitz looked up, startled, scraggly hair falling into his grey eyes. "Doctor!" he yelped, and the Time Lord strode toward him, grinning.

"Marvelous," the Doctor enthused and plopped himself to the ground in front of his friend. "Much better than whatever you were playing before. Paul really would have enjoyed your interpretation."

Fitz remembered to blink, and close his mouth, and breathe, and his heart remembered to start beating on its own, thank goodness. The Doctor was still grinning, curly long brown hair wild about his head, wearing one of his long velvet coats, slender and beautiful and alien like always. Fitz caught the thought too late and looked down at his fingers resting on his guitar strings, blushing frantically while his brain tried to whistle innocently and failed majestically. Any good groovy feeling he had had was very definitely gone now.

"Are you going to play anything else?" the Doctor was asking, and Fitz tried to concentrate on the content of his words rather than just the soothing lilt of his voice, and how it always made him feel safer to know it was there, and how it always made him feel happier to know it was signaling him out by talking specially to him. Stupid brain, focusing on the wrong stupid things.

"Uh…was there something in particular you wanted me to play?" Fitz risked a look up at his friend and for a moment enjoyed the happiness suffusing the Doctor's too-pale face. It'd been a while since he'd been really enthusiastic about something, in that little kid way of his; it'd been a while since he'd looked happy, really happy, not just fake-happy-'cos-your-friends-are-watching. Fitz was suddenly glad he had managed to bring that look out on his friend's face.

"Well, no, not really," the Doctor admitted, "but you did seem to be on a roll there."

"With one song," Fitz pointed out.

"It was a very good song."

"It's also a very short song."

"Why were you playing it?"

"Sorry?"

The Doctor was abruptly serious, in that damnable mercurial-shifting-emotion way of his, and Fitz blinked at him in what was hopefully not a stupid way. "Why were you playing that song?"

"Erm…it seemed like a good song to play at the time?"

"Is anything wrong, Fitz?"

"What?" He tried to laugh and winced at his own attempt. "'Course not. Why d'you think that?"

The Doctor was frowning at him. Fitz couldn't bear those blue eyes, so he looked down at his guitar again, began fiddling with it, tuning it. His whole body was jumping under that look, though, making his hands shaky and useless.

"You sounded angry," the Doctor said after a long pause. "You don't usually."

"It's a bit of an angry song," Fitz tried out diffidently.

"Not one you usually play when you come in here," the Doctor added.

Fitz shrugged, unable to disagree with that and unable to say anything else either. He felt unhappy. Depressed again. He wished the Doctor would go away so he could keep playing. It was odd how whenever the Doctor _was_ around he wanted him to go away, and yet when he wasn't around, Fitz kept waiting for him to show up—

He let go of the guitar, letting it slide down in his lap, leaning his head back to breathe, breathe, breathe. He could feel the Doctor's curious eyes on him, and then he heard a rustle, felt smooth velvet resting on his body as the Doctor came closer and touched a hand lightly to his arm. "Are you alright, Fitz?"

"No, I'm not, actually," he heard himself saying and was utterly mortified, but he couldn't seem to stop the words coming out. Obviously, since they'd already come out. He thought about furiously backtracking, but that would only make it worse. He squeezed his eyes even tighter shut and hoped desperately that the Doctor had gone temporarily deaf.

"What's wrong?"

Bugger.

"Oh, well, I keep feeling depressed and quite moody all the time, and I keep telling myself I have perfectly justifiable reasons for all that, only unconsciously I know those aren't even the real reasons, and that only makes me more depressed."

He could almost hear the frown drifting across his friend's face, and he wanted to laugh. He couldn't even bring himself to crack a smile, though. "What are the real reasons then?" the Doctor asked carefully, and Fitz just knew the other man was walking into some strange, unfathomable area that seemed fit only for humans and would be unbearably confusing for him. It made Fitz angry. The git had spent over a century on Earth with no memory of his own self; you'd think he could have at least begun to understand what the sod all those humans were going on about all the time. Even Spock had caught on quicker than the Doctor did. Bloody hell.

"It's just a bit depressing to find out you're not who you thought you were after all, that's all, and all this time you thought you've been fancying girls when really you've been fancying guys. Only that's not even true, 'cos you don't fancy guys, you just love one bloke in particular—"

He thought about banging his head against the wall behind him until he knocked himself unconscious. Maybe even into his own amnesia. But would that stop him getting all protective over the Doctor, and would that stop him wanting to help the Doctor, and would that stop him loving the Doctor? He couldn't squeeze his eyes any more shut, and he couldn't collapse in on himself until he was just a little speck on the ground, and he could feel the Doctor sitting utterly still beside him, not moving at all. The velvet was tickling the hairs on Fitz's arm.

"Oh," the Doctor said softly and withdrew. Fitz opened his eyes quickly; the Doctor had only sat back, so that now there was a bit of space between them, so that his velvet wasn't right up against Fitz's skin. His blue eyes were distant, thoughtful, not looking at his friend.

Fitz was utterly miserable.

The Doctor glanced at him uneasily. Fitz wanted the TARDIS to open up, right then, just form a hole right behind him and suck him into the vortex. He hated the Doctor's face in that moment, hated the Doctor's cool exotic alien cluelessness.

The Doctor leant forward and kissed him lightly on the lips.

Fitz didn't even have time to get past the freaking out stage—which, granted, would probably have taken him some time to do—before the Doctor broke off and sat back again. Fitz stared at him, wide-eyed. The Doctor met his look evenly, and then shook his head slowly once, twice, thrice. Fitz's heart was pounding, and he felt sick and dizzy, and he was scared by that warning look on his friend's face.

And then the Doctor was standing up and walking away from him, striding out of the room at a measured pace. Fitz blinked, and his head felt like it was drunk only he knew he wasn't, and the Doctor was leaving.

"You may think you're above me, yeah / what you think isn't always true," Fitz said quietly into the ringing silence, and his hands didn't move to cover the guitar strings. The Doctor barely paused in the doorway before he was gone.

Fitz slumped over and decided that wherever they landed next, he was going to a pub. First thing.

And so there he was, sitting in the corner of the darkened space bar, chugging whatever the bartender would throw his way. The Doctor had nodded when Fitz said he was going off on his own for a bit, and Anji had smirked knowingly, which was just plain galling. But that didn't matter now. Now he had a reason to feel unpleasantly drunk, and he could wallow in his depression all he wanted, and it was perfectly reasonable to think the Universe was laughing its arse off at him, because that sort of thinking made logical sense when you were completely plastered.

You could also sing when you were completely plastered. Sing at the top of your lungs, and since you weren't that bad a singer, no-one complained.

Fitz staggered out of the bar and wandered off to find his friends, or the TARDIS, or trouble, whichever came his way first, and while he walked, he sang to himself.

_And I only kiss your shadow   
I cannot feel your hand   
You're a stranger now unto me   
Lost in the dangling conversation   
And the superficial sighs   
In the borders of our lives_


End file.
